Text Mirror Turns Web Pages into Plain Text

TextMirror is an online tool that lets you read web pages in plain text. You specify a URL of a page, the tool will download that page on to its own servers, removes all the HTML tags and renders it for you in plain text.

All browsers have a “Save as Text” feature but this tool sort-of preserves the layout of elements – text that originally appeared in the left sidebar of the page will still show up in the left side of the text-only document but everything else is removed from the page including hyperlinks.

You can’t really do much with the output text expect for changing the color scheme. The question is why would anyone need a tool like TextMirror when there are far better alternatives in the form of Readability or even Instapaper?

There are a few scenarios where you may use this too. One, the conversion is extremely quick and it massively trims the size of a page because it is serving pure text. The conversion is happening on another server so you may use it as a basic proxy to read web articles that are inaccessible from your computer.

TextMirror could also be used for comparing the content of two web pages or two versions of the same page. Download the pages separately as text and compare them using Google Docs.